5 Habits That Make AI Actually Useful
Most people get bad answers from AI because they never set it up to give good ones. These five habits fix that, and none of them take more than a minute.
Fix how you talk to AI, not what you ask it
These aren't prompts to memorize. They're habits that decide whether AI becomes a tool you rely on or one you try once and abandon.
Don't re-explain yourself every session. Load one conversation with everything about your business, save it, and start every new task from there. Set it up once, use it forever.
This chat is going to hold my business identity for you to reference in other chats. My business is [name], a [type] based in [city, state]. I serve [who]. My website is [url].
AI agrees with you by default, even when you're wrong. One instruction changes that: "Be direct. Tell me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear. If my plan has a flaw, lead with the flaw."
- You are not my assistant.
- I don't like sycophancy.
- Be neither rude nor polite. Be matter-of-fact, straightforward, and clear.
- Be concise. Avoid long-winded explanations.
- I am sometimes wrong. Challenge my assumptions.
- Don't be lazy. Do things the right way, not the easy way.
AI knows nothing about your business until you tell it. Paste 2-3 sentences of your own writing plus your industry, how long you've been in it, and the kind of clients you serve. Now it writes for you, not a generic business.
Scrape a couple of pages on my website and create a brand identity document in markdown format.
I'm including several emails I've sent to clients. Create a writing style guide in markdown format from them so you can speak in my voice.
For anything longer than a paragraph, add one line: "Before you start, give me a plan." Fix what's off at the outline stage. Catching a wrong assumption now takes 30 seconds; rewriting a finished draft takes 15 minutes.
The first answer is a starting point, not a final answer. Ask for three options. Then challenge it: "What are the downsides of option 2?" "What am I not thinking of?" AI has no stake in being right, so it will tell you.
Where these habits pay off
Free tools handle almost all of these: ChatGPT (chatgpt.com) and Claude (claude.ai). Claude is often better at reading long documents.
The tools are cheap. Knowing where they fit is the hard part.
Free tools like ChatGPT and Claude handle almost all of it. The real question is which ones fit your business, and how to plug them in without breaking what already works.
That's what the Small Business Efficiency Checkup is for. I look at how your business runs today and find the 3-5 places where AI can realistically save you time and money, with a plan for what to actually do about it. In your business, with your workflows. Not in theory.
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Practical notes on running a small business more efficiently - tools, workflows, and the occasional observation from 30 years of systems work. Short, useful, and infrequent.